Can A California Assemblyman Really Be Bought Off With A Free JCRC Trip To Israel? Muratsuchi, Long In Pocket To The Israel Lobby, Silences Asian American Educators Who Oppose AB 715

II. SF Mayor Lurie Hoists The Israeli Flag; Jewish Activists Work To Remove It. III. Boy Wonder Eli Beckman stands by as Huffman is protested in Mill Valley. IV: TAG Goes To The UN!

I. Epilogue as Prologue: A Teacher Challenges A State Senator

On Saturday afternoon, as Israeli tanks began to roll into Northern Gaza in further defiance of international law, a room at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center in San Francisco filled to capacity with Democratic Party faithfuls eager to hear the strongly pro-Israel State Senator Scott Weiner, Co-Chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.

Like many elected Democrats trying to wrestle with their party's plummeting favorability with so many of its own voters, Wiener has been rallying Democrats via "town halls" that tend to draw in those constituents who already agree with him. (Representative Jared Huffman held a town hall on Monday at the Mill Valley Community Center, a "safe" community where he was nevertheless intermittently interrupted by those protesting his support for Israel, see Part III of this article.)

At Wiener's Town Hall, a young teacher stood up and asked questions about an unusual piece of legislation that Wiener had co-written with Assemblyman Zbur. News of the bill, AB 715, had only reached the public the week earlier, on Mother's Day, with a surprise stand-alone hearing scheduled abruptly the following Wednesday. The rushed process was designed to circumvent the organized opposition that met the doomed AB 1468, a similar piece of McCarthy-sequence legislation that had to be scrapped.

Despite that, workingclass educators and organizers who opposed AB 715 still managed to show up to the hearing in Sacramento, outnumbering the bill's supporters by almost two to one. But among the constituents who could not travel to Sacramento on Wednesday morning was the young teacher who confronted Wiener at his town hall event.

The video of the encounter itself is not great quality, I share it primarily so you can hear her voice. In contrast to the banal and cynical verbiage of the wealthy Senator Wiener, the young teacher's voice is full of life, and of hope, and she asked an entirely necessary question:

Wiener calmly provided an answer that managed to evade any of the substance of her question, and so the teacher persisted in challenging him. On the recording, you can hear the crowd trying to drown out the teacher by applauding Wiener's answer. Momentarily, the teacher paused, then continued questioning the Senator. She was eventually moved out of the room.

Throughout the entire episode, not a single attendee stood up for the teacher, nor added their voice to hers. It does not appear that anyone in the room raised the issue of Israel's genocide at all during that event. If only one person had stood up for her, it might have started a small ripple effect, moving others to action or at least reflection. But this is how broken San Francisco is now, with the biggest issues being only that of the density of housing or the legalization of psilocybin (to name two of Wiener’s obsessions):

In the very short space of time the teacher found to confront Senator Wiener, she could not provide all of the many details of AB 715's dangers. Those other details, more fully exposed during the Assembly hearing, had made clear why the teacher had taken the risk she did in confronting the powerful State Senator.

At the State Capitol, a Broad Range of Experts Testifed Against AB 715, While Support Came Primarily from Lobbyists:

As experts have testified and written in the week since the bill was announced, AB 715 will have a chilling effect on California educators. Retired teacher Marcy Winograd summed it up as a ramping up of complaint procedures "in the state education code to punish teachers, school board members, and teacher trainers accused of anti-semitism for teaching about Israel's genocide in Gaza."

And, as one of the expert witnesses at Wednesday's hearing explained, AB 715 wouldn't stop at punishing teachers for teaching about Israel's genocide in Gaza. The language of the bill could also punish educators for teaching about the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans in camps such as Manzanar. Or, for that matter, the Trail of Tears, yet another in a long line of “displacements” of Native Americans peoples throughout the USA into "reservations". (A recent study by a UC Irvine professor indicates that nearly half of all households on Native American reservations lack clean water or adequate sanitation.)

Much of the supporters' rationale for the bill rested on the bizarrely exaggerated claims of increases in antisemitism in California schools. But claims of 300% or 600% increase in "antisemitic" attacks are founded on the insistence that anything from wearing a watermelon pin or a keffiyeh – to correctly identifying Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide – constitutes "antisemitism". The rationale for the bill also ignores the far greater and more serious increase in anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents, even in "liberal" California.

In the vast majority of those cases of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim incidents, Arabs and Muslims are expected to simply bear the discrimination, since filing complaints or seeking redress in such an unjust system is often not worth the retaliation that ensues.

That such discrimination has been borne by so many different groups in California goes a long way to explain why the opposition to AB 715 was both so numerous and so racially diverse, from young Black teachers, like the woman below…

…to the blonde, blue-eyed widow of anti-war Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey:

In other words, the rationale for AB 715 rests on a warped definition of antisemitism, and AB 715 will only further aggravate that dynamic. As JVP's Seth Morrison and many other Jewish activists have continually cautioned, the conflation of antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel is in itself antisemitic, as it implies that, to be authentically Jewish, one must support Israel, a religious ethnostate that did not even exist until 1948.

I urge you to read CAIR's response to the legislation written after the hearing, as well as Winograd's article in LA Progressive. Both Winograd and Shaanth Nanguneri had written about AB 1468, the precursor to AB 715, those articles are also important context. But for the purposes of this article, I want to take you inside the hearing room: to try to show happened, particularly between Chair Muratsuchi and Asian American opponents of AB 715, and what it suggests.

Demographic Gulf Between Supporters and Opponents (and a predictable lack of disclosure from Israel lobbyists who spoke regarding their relationship to Education Chair Muratsuchi):

One of the most obvious details from the hearing for AB 715 was who constituted support for the bill: Over a quarter of supporters of the bill at Wednesday's hearing either lead; have principal roles at; or are tightly linked to various pro-Israel lobbying groups that conveniently disregard shifting views on Israel among American Jews. These pro-Israel groups include but are not limited to: JPAC, JCRC Bay Area, Jewish Legislative Caucus, the ADL, Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, JCRC Sacramento, JPAC Coalition, American Jewish Committee for Northern California, Jewish Democratic Coalition of the Bay Area, Jewish Silicon Valley – and, on the lower end, the late-coming Israel-lobby aspirant "Marin Jewish Parents and Allies Union".

Notably, the supporters of AB 715 were almost entirely white, save for one Asian American and one Black (or biracial) American.

The racial and ethnic makeup of the far more numerous opponents of AB 715 stood in stark contrast to the supporters, with approximately half being either Asian, Black, Latino, Indigenous or Middle Eastern. Jewish opponents of the bill, many of whom are children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, showed up in such significant numbers that they made up over half of the white opponents of the bill.

Muratsuchi’s Largely Undisclosed Conflict of Interest: How Much Should A Five-Day Trip To Israel During the Off-Season Cost, Anyway?

The demographic disparity was obvious on its face. But what wasn't openly discussed was the financial relationship between Chair Muratsuchi and the Israel lobby, specifically JCRC Bay Area and the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, which had wined and dined the Assemblyman on a bizarrely expensive five-day trip to Israel in February 2024, all while Israeli bombs rained down upon civilians in Gaza. (In fact, some of the most horrifying images from Israel's bombing occurred that month, including the image of the young girl cast into the sky by the bombing, who was subsequently ensnared on a piece of rebar from a destroyed building.)

I had managed to briefly interview Muratsuchi about this conflict last August in Sacramento, the video is below.

In the time since, Muratsuchi did file his Form 700, which shows that he received two travel gifts, each for $7,904.00, from the JFLA and the JCRC for a total of $15,808, confirmed by his office staff this morning. (Damon Connolly went on the same trip, also paid jointly for by JFLA and JCRC, but his trip cost "only" $12,266.)

Why would a five-day trip to Israel in February 2024 cost $15,808? What did the JCRC, the JFLA, and the interests they represent, expect in return for their "gifts"?

Well, as many of us watched Muratsuchi repeatedly cut off and dismiss the concerns of Asian Americans who spoke in opposition to AB 715, the quid pro quo might be an expectation that Muratsuchi would use his ethnic/racial identity to beat down on his fellow Asian Americans who criticized anti-Palestinian legislation such as AB 715. Muratsuchi, in an uncomfortable echo from another era, was particularly unfair to Filipino and South Asian speakers, see video clip below:

The compromises made by Asian, Black, and Latino legislators who have signed on to the Israel lobby's support of AB 715 in defiance of the sentiments in their own communities remain a vulnerability not only for legislators, but for the Israel lobby itself. (What may have set State Senator Henry Stern off during the SB 472 was not only the Jewish anti-Zionist critics, but the inconvenient reminder during public comment that, as far as Holocausts go, six million is a far lesser number than the tens of millions who were killed as a result of the ten-year occupation of China by the Japanese military.) Overall support for Israel in the US has dropped precipitously in the 19 months of Israel's genocide of Palestinian civilians; that support is even lower among non-white groups, many of whom have direct experience with, or are children of, populations that endured prior genocidal campaigns that were also funded, and/or enacted, by the US government.

Muratsuchi's cutting off of Asian American speakers started with the very first opposition speaker, a Filipino American professor. Given that Muratsuchi had indulged the white Israel lobby speakers with barely any interruption, his cutting off of the Filipino American professor drew immediate derision from the audience. Muratsuchi then used their shocked reaction to paint the opposition as somehow unruly, rather than correcting the double standard he was imposing. Muratsuchi's repeated cutting off of Asian American speakers was blatant enough to be noticed by the white opposition speakers, one of whom even mentioned it in her comments.

AB 715 passed unanimously, but it may be a pyrrhic victory. The bill is so hated, and it comes at such a time of Israel's increasing war crimes against civilians in Gaza, that it may well backfire on the legislators who supported it. A week after Mother's Day, even though Mahmoud Khalil was still in an ICE detention center for speaking out against Israel's genocide, many Americans of all ages, races, and faiths, continued to protest in support of Palestine in the streets and at town halls.

Among the many grotesqueries you will find if you look more closely at the supporters of AB 715: The second speaker in support of the bill, Rabbi Ben Herman of Mosaic Law Congregation in Sacramento, had penned a recent opinion piece in The Forward proclaiming his support for Yoav Gallant, who, along with Benjamin Netanyahu, has an ICC warrant issued for his arrest. The opinion piece is titled: "Dear Yoav Gallant: You are welcome at my synagogue."

I have no idea if such an invitation would be a clear desecration of a sacred space (one is expected to welcome the sinner), but in the extreme case of Yoav Gallant, it amounts to complicity in Israel’s genocide. Men such as Rabbi Ben Herman, to put it charitably, are not currently in their right mind. And yet in Sacramento, they once again had their way with our legislators, against the protests of many Jewish Americans. It is up to us to ordinary people, in concert with groups like AROC, CAIR, JVP, and other civil rights-centered groups, to push back on this, which brings me to a recent action in San Francisco.

II. Billionaire Mayor of San Francisco, and Heir to the Great Levi-Strauss Fortune, Daniel Lurie, Hoists Israeli Flag. Jewish San Franciscans Have It Removed.

Imagine that, as Israel ramps up its "final solution" against Palestinians in Gaza, as Palestinian children starve to death and the IDF continues to bomb what little hospital structure remains in Gaza, an elected official would choose to hoist the Israeli flag on the balcony outside his office.

This is what San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie did on May 1, 2025, an act which is particularly ironic if you are familiar with the once fiercely anti-Zionist sentiments of the Levi-Strauss family, to which Lurie is now heir. The hoisting of the Israeli flag was celebrated by the SF JCRC, which featured photos of the event on their Facebook page.

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. A small band of peacenik Jews organized as "Chavurah for a Free Palestine" (CFP) descended on the Mayor's Office and had the flag removed. By their account, the removal happened within an hour.

I reached out to CFP for an interview, and hope to bring you more details about this story. (Mayor Lurie's office has not responded to my inquiry.)

For now I just want to make you aware that, just twenty or thirty years ago, there still existed media in San Francisco, even a corporate media, that retained staff and opinion writers who might at least have written about the incident. One or two of those staff members may even have written opinion pieces condemning the Mayor for such an act.

But in today's local media environment, the incident was entirely ignored – even and especially by "independent" local media in San Francisco. Bookmark that, please, because the complicity of local media is not uncoupled from the tight relationships between prominent members of the Israel lobby and "independent" local media.

III. Congressman Jared Huffman Is Protested At Town Hall in Mill Valley, Boy Wonder Eli Beckman Says Nothing

On Monday, May 12, Congressman Huffman held a Town Hall on the environment in probably the safest bubble in his district: at the spacious and luxurious Mill Valley Community Center, a building which is entirely unrecognizable to Mill Valleyans of a certain age. (In the mid-1970s, the Mill Valley Community Center was a tiny, shack-like building with breadbaking contests judged by the friendly and antiwar Mrs. Parlette, and where beleaguered husbands were later dragged by their wives to disco dancing classes after "Saturday Night Fever" was released. Whoever thought we’d miss the complicated 1970s as a “simpler” time?)

During Huffman's Town Hall, two anti-war protesters who have been actively involved in advocating for a ceasefire interrupted Huffman's comments. I have some grainy video that a reader sent me, and am seeking a better copy.

I was able to contact one of the protesters. He spoke for many when he laid out what is happening in Gaza and asked, "What is an appropriate response for a citizen at this point?"

Referring to Huffman's support for Israel, which is now the subject of a formal complaint to the United Nations by Taxpayers Against Genocide, the protester stated, "At this point, they are criminals. We went in to disrupt and agitate, there can be no business as usual. You can't talk about mitigating climate change and not talk about the pollution from 800 US military bases around the world."

In fact, a similar point has rightly been made: that Israel's genocide is also an ecocide, and I think the second protester made specific reference to that term.

The first protester made the point that Huffman's concerns for "saving our democracy" omitted the reality that the US has never been a democracy. This is a point that Professor Paul Woodruff took great pains to make in the aftermath of the Bush administration's reaction to 9/11. Woodruff wrote an entire book about this, cautioning his fellow Americans that a "representative" democracy is only the illusion of democracy.

But the first protester wasn’t dreaming of the classics. "I'm in the Gerald Horne school," he shared, "1776 was a counter-revolution, I'm willing to acknowledge that were were some opportunities made for white men, but you can't separate that from the explosion of slavery. We went from 500,000 slaves in 1776 to 4.5 million slaves by the beginning of the Civil War. That's a 900% increase."

During the Huffman event, three older women seated in the audience had held up what appeared to be images of Palestinian children. They apparently also interrupted Congressmen Huffman, although less loudly. It was interesting to me that these particular women had not been very vocal on the issue; it's possible that people who did not want to speak up when a Democrat was in office are finally taking part in public protest of Israel's genocide now that Trump is at the helm. (Don’t snub them, we need all the help we can get.)

Eli Beckman In Attendance:

Of the many elected officials who attended the hearing was apparently Corte Madera Councilmember (and JCRC BANJO member) Eli Beckman, now running for Damon Connolly's termed-out Assembly seat. Beckman had been fêted by the JCRC in Tel Aviv during his all-expenses paid junket to Israel in 2023, and is currently endorsed in his assembly race by a retinue of pro-Israel backers, including the infamous Yoav Schlesinger, the former AIPAC director now seated on the San Anselmo Town Council.

The Interfaith Council Endorsement:

I have reached out to some of Beckman's endorsers, and I did belatedly recognize at least one familiar name: Michael Pappas, of the San Francisco Interfaith Council, a group initially founded by Mayor Art Agnos. SFIC was presumably founded with the best of intentions, but its current mission appears to be tightly entwined with the wishes of the SF JCRC.

Pappas has an interesting history: I had first met him several decades ago when he was still the priest at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in San Francisco. He was so charming that I remember thinking, "That man may be a bit too charming to be a priest." As it later turned out, during his priesthood at Holy Trinity, Pappas engaged in multiple affairs that may or may not have warranted his being de-frocked. Rather than face that possibility, Pappas chose instead to resign, and later ended up on the board of the SF JCRC. He became very close friends, a sort of escort, for the aging Rita Semel, Executive Director Emeritus of the SF JCRC.

A promotional video made by the SF JCRC about Pappas indicates not only that his seminary training was paid for the "the oldest municipal bond house in New Jersey" but something more revealing: Per Rita Semel, after he left the priesthood, "Michael had stopped being a priest and was looking for a job and he came to be our first and our only executive director. What Michael has done is to put the face on the Interfaith Council in ways that we only dreamed about when we started the Council 27 years ago." Wow.

Arguably, one of the ways Pappas has “put the face” on the Interfaith Council is by continuing to whitewash the local Israel lobby and endorse pro-Israel candidates while conveniently entirely ignoring the plight of Greek Orthodox parishioners trapped in Gaza. I reached out to Pappas to ask both about his lack of public concern for Gaza's Greek Orthodox population, and about what seems like his reflexive endorsement of Eli Beckman, but he has yet to return my call.

I will be writing more about Eli Beckman's campaign for Assembly. Even though Beckman has a thin resumé, there's a more complicated story behind his campaign and its supporters.

IV. Taxypayers Against Genocide Goes To The UN!

This month, Taxpayers Against Genocide, CAIR, and the National Lawyers Guild Int’l Committee held a press conference to announce the filing of their complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) against the US government for its complicity in Israel’s genocide. This is a group that originated out of the North Bay, and it's worth following their progress. All of the people organizing with the group are like no one I've ever met, and if I can ever catch up, I hope to interview some of them. In the meantime, here's a great video of their press conference – there’s so much in here.

Thanks as always to patient readers. There was a lot more that happened in Sacramento and in the Bay Area in the last two weeks, and I hope to bring you more news and links about that soon. In the meantime, please don’t stop speaking up and asking questions. Your voices on all these issues are needed more than ever.

©️2025 Eva Chrysanthe